


Don't Be Fooled

by Dustbunny3



Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/F, fake smiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 11:06:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13902714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dustbunny3/pseuds/Dustbunny3
Summary: Sometimes, Lifeline brings too much of the job home with her.





	Don't Be Fooled

**Author's Note:**

> Written for FemFeb this year. The new ship train just kept on rolling. Technically, I suppose this would be the Of Masters and Mayhem continuity, but I haven't actually read- or don't remember reading the issue that Lifeline and Quickslinger appear in. This is something I thought up based on their toy bios instead, particularly this bit from Lifeline's: "Don't let my smile fool you. It's part of my root programming." I also remembered and thus imagined Quickslinger as slightly taller than she actually is, thigh height to Lifeline instead of knee height, but I'm not sure it matters much. Anyway, enjoy?

Quickslinger is finishing putting her newly cleaned gun back together when the door swooshes open. A flash of white and green in her peripheral ready a greeting in her processing queue, but it's overridden by a violent flinch when she looks up at Lifeline.

"Is something wrong?" Lifeline asks as she crosses the room to settle beside Quickslinger on their recharge slab, all the same intonations she would use to address a patient. The upward curl of her lips doesn't so much as waver.

Some, Quickslinger supposes, would call it a smile. But she's known Lifeline for long enough to have seen her smile and she remembers even now what it looked like.

"Hey," she says with the same deliberate care that she gives to setting her gun aside. She would swear- not to Lifeline, at least not now- that she can feel that not-smile. It burns her optics like an itch, crawls through them and then along her lines and circuits, fizzles in the joints of her trigger finger. It's- tolerable, outside. But here, between the two of them in their own personal quarters, it's like rust in her vents. "You don't have to do that here, come on."

"Do...?" Lifeline's volume drops over the course of that single syllable and she prods with her fingertips at the corners of her mouth. "Oh." The light of her optics dims but still her expression doesn't change.

Quickslinger stands and, though it makes her plating want to peel back from her protoform, reaches out with both hands, nudging Lifeline's hands aside, and skims light touches across her lips, following the curve and pressing ever so carefully down. Then again; again. It's a little like a massage and a little like trying to mold cold iron by hand. Lifeline's hands have fallen to her hips and her optics flicker, a sporadic rhythm. The kisses Quickslinger leans to brush along the same lines are nearly desperate and her moan is all relief when she feels a more genuine shape begin to form beneath them.

Leaning back just far enough to eye her work, Quickslinger dismisses a string of platitudes and promises almost before she can think of them; how can she lie when she's asking Lifeline to be honest? Lifeline's trembling lips and pale optics ask her to say something, though, and so she cuddles close, holds on tight and says, "I'm here."


End file.
